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Thursday, February 23, 2012

Twilight Author's Site was Compromised to Serve Malware

If you’ve recently visited the website of Stephenie Meyer – author of the insanely popular Twilight book series – then you will want to scan your computer for malware.

Researchers at Avast! antivirus security firm recently found that hackers had injected malicious JavaScript code into Meyer’s official website that exposed unsuspecting site visitors to the Crimepack Exploit Kit.

Like other exploit kits, the Crimepack Exploit Pack attempts to leverage system vulnerabilities – which, of course, are usually associated with Java or Adobe PDF Reader – in order to plant malware on the target’s machine.

There's no word on how long the malicious code was present on Stephenie Meyer's site, but the website has been scrubbed of the evil code. Unfortunately, those who had horrible timing of paying her site a visit during the attack are still stuck with the aftermath of playing computer clean-up.

The internet is a dangerous place and this should serve as a reminder that it is critical that you keep your computer operating system and software up-to-date with the latest security patches. Running antivirus software at all times will definitely help, too.

Failure to do so can easily result in a system infection.

Image of malicious Javascript credit: Avast!

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